Dr. Maren Solvik
Chief Researcher & Cultural Archivist, The Riding Collective
At a Glance
| Age | 41 |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Norwegian-Chilean (dual citizenship) |
| Based | Tromsoe, Norway / Valparaiso, Chile (splits the year) |
| Languages | Norwegian, Spanish, English, Portuguese, conversational Mapudungun |
| Disciplines | Endurance riding, Nordic ski mountaineering, surfing |
| Years riding | 29 (first horse at 12, first wave at 14, first summit at 17) |
Academic Background
PhD in Cultural Anthropology — University of Edinburgh, 2014
Thesis: "Hoofprints and Horizon Lines: Embodied Knowledge Transmission in Mounted Pastoral Communities of Patagonia and Northern Scandinavia"
MA in Museum Studies & Heritage Management — University of Oslo, 2009
Focus: Repatriation ethics and community-controlled archives
BA in Social Anthropology — Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, 2007
Minor in Indigenous Studies
Her doctoral research spent three years embedded with Mapuche horsemen in southern Chile and Sami reindeer herders in Finnmark, Norway. The thesis argued that riding knowledge — the body's relationship to terrain through an animal or a board or a set of skis — constitutes a form of intangible cultural heritage that Western archival practices systematically fail to capture because they privilege text over embodied practice.
The Edinburgh faculty called it "one of the most ambitious comparative ethnographies we've examined in a decade." The Mapuche community elders she worked with called it "the first time an outsider asked us what we wanted written down."
Career History
2023 — Present: Chief Researcher, The Riding Collective
2019 — 2023: Senior Research Fellow, Nordic Museum of Cultural Heritage (Norsk Folkemuseum), Oslo
Led the "Living Landscapes" initiative — a five-year program to document how Indigenous and rural communities in Scandinavia maintain relationships with terrain through traditional movement practices (riding, skiing, herding). Developed the consent-first methodology that would later become the foundation of The Riding Collective's research standards.
2016 — 2019: Fieldwork Director, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Programme, Paris
Evaluated nominations to the ICH Representative List across three continents. Conducted site assessments for equestrian traditions in Central Asia, surfing culture in Polynesia, and rodeo heritage in the Americas. Left UNESCO after growing frustrated with institutional pace and what she describes as "the politics of who gets to call something heritage."
2014 — 2016: Postdoctoral Researcher, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge
Studied how Arctic communities transmit terrain knowledge across generations — how a Sami herder teaches a child to read snow the way a surfer's parent teaches them to read swell. Published two papers connecting embodied knowledge theory to environmental conservation.
2012 — 2014: Archival Consultant, Mapuche Cultural Foundation, Temuco, Chile
While completing her PhD, helped the foundation build a community-controlled oral history archive. Designed protocols ensuring the community retained full ownership and veto power over all recorded materials. This project became the template for everything she has built since.
2009 — 2012: Curatorial Assistant, Viking Ship Museum (Vikingskipshuset), Oslo
Her first professional role. Catalogued equestrian artifacts and contributed to the exhibition "Horse and Human: 4,000 Years of Partnership in Scandinavia." Realized during this period that museums were excellent at preserving objects and terrible at preserving the living practices those objects came from.
Specializations
- Oral history methodology and ethics in riding communities
- Embodied knowledge transmission (how riding skills pass between generations without text)
- Decolonial archival practices and community narrative sovereignty
- Comparative ethnography of human-terrain relationships across riding disciplines
- Sacred site identification, evaluation, and protection advocacy
- Intangible cultural heritage policy and UNESCO frameworks
- Arctic and Southern Hemisphere pastoral riding traditions
Research Methodology
Maren's approach starts from a single principle: the community is the authority, not the researcher.
Her methodology, refined over fifteen years of fieldwork, follows what she calls the "Three Returns" framework:
- Return the microphone. Communities speak for themselves. The researcher's role is to create conditions for documentation, not to narrate or interpret on behalf of others. Every oral history project begins with the question: "What do you want preserved, and for whom?"
- Return the archive. Everything collected belongs to the community first. The Riding Collective holds a license to present materials, not ownership of them. Communities can amend, retract, or restrict access at any time, for any reason, without explanation.
- Return the frame. Western academic frameworks are one lens, not the lens. When documenting Mongolian horse culture, the evaluative criteria must emerge from Mongolian horsemen — not from a Norwegian anthropologist applying European heritage standards. The researcher's job is to learn the community's own framework for significance, then build the archive around it.
In practice, this means Maren spends weeks or months building relationships before any recording equipment appears. She rides with people before she interviews them. She eats with families. She mucks stalls. She waxes boards. The research happens after trust, never before it.
Published Works
Solvik, M. (2017). Terrain as Text: How Riding Communities Read Landscapes. University of Edinburgh Press.
A revised and expanded version of her doctoral thesis, widely assigned in cultural anthropology and heritage studies programs. Argues that the physical relationship between rider and terrain constitutes a "landscape literacy" that is as culturally specific and transmissible as spoken language.
Solvik, M. (2020). "Who Owns the Wave? Surf Heritage, Indigenous Erasure, and the Limits of Western Archival Practice." Journal of Material Culture, 25(3), 291-314.
Traces how the documentation of surfing history systematically centered Californian and Australian narratives while erasing Polynesian origins. Became one of the most-cited papers in surf heritage discourse and was referenced in the 2022 ISA resolution on Indigenous surfing recognition.
Solvik, M. & Huenulaf, R. (2022). "Asking Permission: A Practical Framework for Consent-Based Cultural Documentation in Riding Communities." International Journal of Intangible Heritage, 17, 45-68.
Co-authored with Mapuche elder and horseman Roberto Huenulaf. Lays out the practical protocols for consent-first oral history collection that now form the basis of The Riding Collective's research standards.
Why She Joined The Riding Collective
Maren spent a decade inside institutions — museums, universities, UNESCO — watching riding cultures get flattened into exhibit plaques and heritage nominations. She watched Mongolian horse culture get reduced to a tourism brochure. She watched Polynesian surf traditions get credited to white Californians. She watched rodeo get stripped of its Black and Mexican roots and sold back as something it never was.
The institutions were not malicious. They were just slow, and structured around objects instead of people, and governed by committees that had never sat on a horse or paddled into a lineup.
When she encountered The Riding Collective, she saw something different: a project built by riders, for riders, that treated cultural preservation not as an academic exercise but as something urgent and alive. A place where a Basque pelota player and a Mongolian eagle hunter and a Compton trail rider could all exist in the same archive without being filtered through someone else's framework.
She joined because the Collective asked the question she had been asking her entire career: What if the people who ride got to decide how their stories are told?
Personal Statement
This text appears on The Riding Collective website.
I have spent my adult life in two places: the field and the archive. In the field, riding with communities from Patagonia to Finnmark, I learned that every riding tradition carries a library inside it — knowledge about terrain, weather, animals, seasons, danger, joy, grief, and home that has been passed body-to-body for generations. In the archive, I learned how easily that library gets lost. A community disperses. A language fades. A landscape gets developed. And suddenly a thousand years of knowing how to move through a particular piece of earth disappears, because no one thought to ask the people who lived it what mattered.
That is what I am here to prevent.
My role at The Riding Collective is simple in principle and enormous in practice: to ensure that the cultural knowledge embedded in every riding tradition — from classical dressage to barefoot trail riding, from Polynesian wave navigation to Kazakh eagle hunting on horseback — is documented with rigor, preserved with integrity, and controlled by the communities it belongs to.
I am not a neutral observer. I ride. I have ridden since I was twelve years old, on horses across the Andes and through Arctic birch forests, on waves off the Chilean coast, on skis through Norwegian mountains. I know what it feels like when terrain becomes language — when the horse shifts weight and you understand something the ground is saying. That feeling is culture. It is heritage. And it is disappearing faster than any institution can catalogue it.
The Riding Collective is not an institution. It is a community of riders who believe their history matters, who refuse to let it be flattened into content, and who are willing to do the hard, slow, honest work of preservation. I am here because this is the project I have been waiting for — one that treats riders as the primary source, not the subject.
If you are part of a riding community with stories to tell, I want to hear from you. Not to study you. To listen, and to help you build something that lasts.
— Dr. Maren Solvik, Tromsoe / Valparaiso